Tonight is the WWE's Royal Rumble pay-per-view event, airing from Philadelphia (the crowd should be really hot tonight, Philly is a great wrestling city).

The Rumble is always great fun. This year's card promises lots of excitement and surprises as Daniel Bryan has returned, Randy Orton is rumored to be an entrant, the Rock has been sighted in Philadelphia, and the legendary Sting will advance his feud with HHH before their inevitable match at Wrestlemania.

Of course, the three way match between Seth Rollins, Brock Lesnar, and John Cena will be epic--if booked correctly.
What do I think will happen tonight in that match? Lesnar is leaving the company to return to MMA. He has to be written out of the story. There have also been teases of turning Lesnar face on the way out the door.

Prediction:

What will happen. Cena is beaten down by Lesnar. Cena does the "Super Cena" comeback and pins Lesnar. Rollins cashes in the "money in the bank" briefcase and with help from The Authority attacks Lesnar. Rollins wins the strap. Lesnar then has a feud with The Authority. Question: what to do with Paul Heyman? Heyman could flip and side with Rollins. I would prefer that Heyman be paired with a floundering Roman Reigns...but that is another conversation.

What I would like to see happen. Lesnar wins clean and retains the belt. Alternatively, as some have suggested, Lesnar loses without being pinned. He is so enraged that he subsequently enters the Rumble with a high number and destroys everyone. The last exchange in the ring is between Lesnar, Bryan, and Orton.

Lesnar wins, but the audience is teased with a potential Wrestlemania clinic and dream match.

"Did you know that Bill Belichick deflated my balls?" Such is a rumor circulating on Twitter in the fun #fivewordsthatruinsex hashtag game from a few evenings ago. "Did you pull out? No" and "the ovulation calendar is wrong" were two of my most favorite examples of pithy witty that I shared with the Twitterverse.

Lose the NFL’s pomp and rum-dummy-dum rhetoric, and we see the NFL as what it is: a moderately skanky business concern selling us something that is both bad for us and extremely addictive. The NFL is welcome to use its delusion however it wants, just as people are welcome to talk about it in the NFL’s own language if they wish. But, as serious as Bill Belichick is about football—and the great gray recession of his personality suggests that this is an acid seriousness that opens onto a big, mean void—he clearly does not see or think about the NFL this way.

He, and maybe we, can see a rulebook that’s too big and too dimly understood and too lazily mis-enforced to constrain his intellect and ambition. He sees a game that is bigger and weirder than any authority that would attempt to govern it. He sees how soft, stupid, and self-regarding the NFL truly is, and then he does whatever he wants, secure in the knowledge that no one can really stop him from doing it. He innovates in thrilling ways and cheats in trivial ones for the same reason, and it’s the reason that people climb Everest….

Here on WARN, we discussed Chris Kyle and the movie American Sniper several times. The World War 2 movie Fury is also being released on blu-ray and DVD this week.

The first movie is Right-wing fascist war porn propaganda. The second movie is much less Right-wing fascist war porn propaganda, but still fails because it has one of the most unbelievable endings in a movie about men and war in the history of film.Saving Private Ryan gave Tom Hanks a heroic cinematic ending borrowed from previous world war 2 movies; Fury has its film as "borrowing from and talking to itself moment" in Brad Pitt's Alamo ending.

I love watching old military training videos online. The German troops who attacked Brad Pitt's tank in Fury should have studied this 1943 training video from the German military.They would have been much more successful.American Sniper borrowed from Dr. David Grossman's theory of "killology" and how to psychologically condition people to kill in battle. His techniques are a more evolved version of the training video "Kill or be Killed" produced by the U.S. military during World War 2.

Any ghetto nerd discoveries to share? Any other thoughts, insights, news items, or revelations to offer for the new week?

5 comments:

KissedByTheSun
said...

Microsoft Holographic. If microsoft delivers on this I seriously fear for the future. Why you ask? Because why exercise when I can wear a 1:1 overlay of Idris Elba through the eyes of my wife's holographic goggles. No one will be themselves anymore. This will be the movie strange days in real life. Only much weirder.

Chris Hedges shares his thoughts on American Sniper today. Much of what he describes has already been discussed here —a tribute to our CDV here. Hedges does have some additional insights that are worth reading. Here's a snippet:“American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.

Sometimes I wonder how much the American "race issue" is secretly also a "class issue". I've noticed an overlap between the Republicans go off about "those shiftless undesirable black people" and way some less enlightened lefties go off about "those shiftless undesirable white people". There's surprising overlap in the rhetoric that seems class based rather than race based.

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